Our Civilization Just Hit Three Great — And Ominous — Inflection Points

(Why the 2020s Are) The Age of Inflection

Image Credit: Sustainable Development Report 2022, page vii

What will history think of this decade? How will it remember it? I think that it’ll come to be thought of as the Age of Inflection. An age where inflection points were hit — and after that, certain forms of decline, if not collapse, began to become irreversible, gather a pace and momentum all their own. If it feels like the world’s out of control these days — welcome to the Age of Inflection.

What do I mean? In the last year or two — since the 2020s began — the world’s crossed a series of Inflection Points. They’re not discussed nearly enough, but they’re the raw stuff of what civilization is. And to put it bluntly, ours isn’t in good shape. So we’re going to discuss, briefly, three great Inflection Points our civilization just hit.

There’s little that’s bigger or more elemental or fundamental than these — you can think of them as turning points on the scale of centuries, which affect the world, well into the future, perhaps even the deep future. We’re not talking about stock markets gyrating by the microsecond — we’re talking about how civilizations rise and fall over centuries. What is an inflection point? When the shape of a curve changes. When it goes from acceleration to deceleration, progress to regress. And that appears to be exactly what’s happening to the macro-indicators of our civilization.

The first Inflection Point our civilization just hit is perhaps the most crucial one of all — and yet, it’s gone by largely unnoticed, except by nerds like me, and you perhaps. The world is now going backwards. What does that mean? It’s not an opinion — it’s an objective fact. The UN keeps track of a thing called the Human Development Index. Broadly speaking, it’s our civilization’s most authoritative measure of progress, in its simplest form.Are people living decent lives? Are they healthy and prosperous? Are they educated and enlightened? For the first time since records began, the index is now plunging downwards.

That’s a sea change — and an ominous one. Let me put it to you another way: our civilization’s most authoritative measure of progress is now going backwards. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Not now — not ever. The entire point of the HDI was to track what came to be thought of as increases in human living standards. Sometimes, there’d be quantum leaps, and most of the time, there’d just be the slow, steady uptick of everything from life expectancy to per capita income to education to trust and happiness. But what almost nobody expected was for human progress to come to a standstill — and then go into reverse.